Preface

Ben Silverstein and Crystal McKinnon

As markers in and of time, anniversaries not only provide a chance to reflect on events of the past but also remind us to pause and consider where we were; to historicise events and take stock of how much (and how little) has changed. As we write this preface to volume 45 of Aboriginal History we are thinking about 2021 as the 30-year anniversary of the tabling in Commonwealth Parliament of the report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

When the Royal Commission was established in 1987, it represented the culmination of many years of fighting for justice by the families and communities of loved ones who had died in custody. Through organisations like the Committee to Defend Black Rights, these families and communities built a movement that fought against the normalisation and naturalisation of deaths in custody, turning the focus rather onto the institutions of the criminal justice system and beyond.¹ They insisted that Black deaths in custody were fundamentally caused by racism, seen in the entrenched social inequality experienced across Australia and what Paul Coe, head of the National Aboriginal and Islander Legal Service Secretariat, described in 1987 as a belief among police ‘they could take an Aboriginal life with immunity’.²

It was this pressure that finally forced the Australian Government to call a royal commission. And just as this activism, led by the families and communities of Aboriginal people who had died in custody whose sustained and powerful advocacy built the movement, so in April 2021 did Aboriginal families once again take to the streets in the fight for justice for their loved ones. At a national day of action, families demanded a meeting with government and called for the implementation of the Royal Commission’s recommendations made some 30 years ago.

When royal commissions and government inquiries are announced, it is the people who have been most affected by the issue who lead the movement.³ Too often, their histories are not recognised or told, and many stories of activism and advocacy by movements for justice are obscured. Histories of these movements are essential if we are to understand the continuities and discontinuities of Aboriginal history.

We need also to take seriously the fact that governments have implemented so few of the Royal Commission’s recommendations, and that there have been at least 500 Indigenous deaths in custody since that Royal Commission report.⁴ A record like this demands histories that do not just lament Indigenous loss but rather apprehend the persistently murderous nature of settler colonialism. And one could draw a direct line between deaths in custody and the experience of those Aboriginal communities, particularly in western New South Wales, who have been ravaged by COVID-19. The particular crisis of this outbreak was an effect of conditions that have been produced over long periods of time through government refusals to ensure adequate access to health care or provide sufficient housing for communities in these areas. Communities managed to endure this crisis largely through the extraordinary work of community organisations in providing advice, resources and medical care.⁵

These kinds of organisations are the basis of the social movements that have long been active around Australia. In 2022 we move towards other significant memorials: January marked 40 years since the Tent Embassy umbrella was first pitched on the lawns of (Old) Parliament House; and, in September, it will be 30 years since Aboriginal people took to the streets of Brisbane to harness the international media attention on the Commonwealth Games, to once again demand rights and justice. The many diverse histories of these communities and movements remain key to the practice of writing true Aboriginal histories.

We begin this volume of Aboriginal History with an important and forensic piece of historical scholarship. In seeking to trace the identity of Jackey Jackey of the Lower Logan River in south-east Queensland, Michael Aird, Joanna Sassoon and David Trigger demonstrate a new and meticulous methodology for linking visual, textual and oral sources across time and space to piece together the record of a man who left traces in dispersed archives, collections, memories, and in Country. This resonates today, both with the relationships between this ancestor and his descendants, and for native title claims that demand cultural and accurate genealogical connections across time. This is research that speaks to the importance of historical truth and embraces complexity and uncertainty, arguing against the neater and easier resolutions that often prevail in public histories.

The volume then turns to two fascinating articles that also provide fascinating readings of diverse and perhaps unexpected sources to illuminate the multiplicity of perspectives on Aboriginal history. Emma Cupitt describes the 17-hour recording of Radio Redfern’s coverage of Aboriginal protests in Sydney as Bicentenary celebrations took place elsewhere in the city. As an Aboriginal community-controlled radio station, Radio Redfern was itself an institutional participant in these protests, a space of organising and intellectual development, and a record of what took place. Cupitt emphasises the multivocality and intertextuality of radio, showing us how the Radio Redfern broadcast provides both a profusion of Aboriginal stories, and situates these in the almost predictable drama of police intervention and attempted intimidation. The next article turns to a reading of assemblages of Yolngu bark paintings in diverse exhibition spaces after the Second World War. Matt Poll and Amanda Harris describe these paintings as ‘ambassadors’, doing political, cultural and diplomatic work to connect across Country in a historical context of repression in which the painters themselves were often prevented from travel and free mobility. Often collected as ethnographic material, in recent decades Indigenous curators have reimagined these paintings in new relationships, providing spaces for Yolngu and others to reconnect with them and, through the paintings, reconnect with ancestors.

This practice of reconnection is dependent on the inscription of the bark paintings as Yolngu knowledge. We turn, then, to two further articles that emphasise different elements of Indigenous knowledge of Country. Cara Cross describes the production and use of mineral medicine—or lithotherapeutics—derived from Burning Mountain in Wonnarua Country. This article historicises the use of this medicine in the context of both a Wonnarua deep historical story of manufacture, use and trade, and the settler colonial context of the past 150 years of dispossession, appropriation and commodification. As well as mapping this process, Cross issues a powerful call for the recognition of Indigenous innovation as cultural heritage. This call for recognition continues in a timely collaborative article by Fred Cahir, Ian Clark, Dan Tout, Benjamin Wilkie and Jidah Clark, who read colonial records against the grain to excavate a nineteenth-century history of Victorian Aboriginal relationships with fire. From a context of dispossession and silencing, they demonstrate that fire has long been central to creating and managing landscapes in south-eastern Australia, providing a basis for the revitalisation of Victorian Aboriginal fire management practices.

Finally, based on extensive oral history work over several years, Maria Panagopoulos presents us with Aboriginal narrations of the experience of moving—or being moved—from the Manatunga settlement on the outskirts of Robinvale into the town itself, on Tati Tati Country in the Mallee region of Victoria. Panagopoulos’s interlocutors remember their contribution to the town over many decades, as workers who built it up and then worked the surrounding farms. But they also remember the verbal and written attacks they faced from white members of the Robinvale community when the prospect of living as neighbours was raised. This experience of white resentment at impending desegregation shamed and hurt the Aboriginal community; in giving voice to that experience, and re-presenting Robinvale Aboriginal people’s sense of themselves, Panagopoulos’s research provides a valuable corrective.

We are also very pleased to be able to publish Greg Lehman’s review essay concerning Cassandra Pybus’s recent award-winning Truganini: Journey through the Apocalypse. Lehman’s carefully considered meditations on the implications of our relationships with history provide a way of thinking through how we research and write Aboriginal history; how some might transform the practice of history and ‘broker some further truth’.

This volume has once again been produced in a context of disruption, as we have worked through further lockdowns and travel bans. We thank the Aboriginal History Board for their work and support, especially Book Reviews editor Annemarie McLaren, as well as copyeditor Geoff Hunt, and Emily Tinker at ANU Press. We also thank the many anonymous referees who generously gave their time and expertise to reviewing articles this year.

References

Cubillo, Eddie. ‘30th Anniversary of the RCIADIC and the “White Noise” of the Justice System is Loud and Clear’. Alternative Law Journal 46, no. 3 (2021): 185–92. doi.org/10.1177/1037969X211019139.

Cunneen, Chris and Amanda Porter. ‘Indigenous Peoples and Criminal Justice in Australia’. In The Palgrave Handbook of Australian and New Zealand Criminology, Crime and Justice, edited by Antje Deckert and Rick Sarre, 667–82. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55747-2_44.

Dennerstein, Lynn. ‘Public Meeting’. Aboriginal Law Bulletin 28 (1987): 2.

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